Message services are increasingly depended upon by users to handle their vital communications, such as email, telephony, and video communications. Many different data protection solutions are employed to protect data in message environments, including data replication solutions. Data replication typically involves creating copies of data volumes and updating the copies as modifications are made to the source data volumes. For example, active databases in email systems can be replicated to redundant, passive databases.
Data protection solutions can be monitored to ensure that they are operating properly. In many such monitoring implementations, alerts are generated when systems or process failures place data at risk. For example, a computing system that hosts a message database in an email system may generate an alert upon the failure of physical or logical elements within the system, such as failed memory, stalled processes, or the like. Personnel can then be dispatched or automated repair solutions initiated to fix or compensate for the failure.
Sometimes the failure of an element within a data protection solution prevents the element from reporting its failed state to a monitoring system. Other times, a failure may trigger an alert that is treated with substantial urgency even though the data is well protected by sufficient redundancy in the data protection solution. In either case, the effectiveness of the data protection is inhibited. In the first case, the failure may reduce redundancy, while in the second case the urgency required by the alert may waste resources and eventually erode the urgency given to future alerts.